


We Are Family

by 221b_hound



Series: Guitar Man [36]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Parentlock, Schmoop, Swearing, it takes a tribe, john shouldn't be so damned proud of himself, very sweary swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-18
Updated: 2013-03-18
Packaged: 2017-12-05 16:34:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/725456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/221b_hound/pseuds/221b_hound
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Violet is giving birth to her first child. The waiting room is full of anxious grandparents. Let's face it - there are an awful lot of them for one small baby. The nurse tries to clear the room. That was a mistake.</p><p>WARNING: serious schmoopage follows.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Are Family

**Author's Note:**

> The title is of course from We Are Family by Sister Sledge.

Nurses and nuns. They’re supposed to be such paragons of kindness and care, but something about them is very intimidating. Theirs is a tough love. Nurses especially.

Nurse Agnes Greenward is an exemplary sample of the breed. Efficient, stern, brisk. She’s a very good nurse. She does not put up with anything even remotely resembling shenanigans on her ward, which is the maternity ward. In forty years of nursing, she has out-frowned, out-glared and out-BAMFed company executives, members of parliament, oil magnates and, once, a crazed ice addict bearing a bread knife.

Nurse Greenward had never met anyone like the Holmes/Watson clan.

She had met Violet Watson-Holmes of course, and her other half, Sherrinford. Lovely couple. Very affectionate, very clear about what they wanted for the birth of their first child. Birthing pool, ambient music, the latest Mars-derived, super-neuro-inhibiting analgesics for reduced pain without reduced awareness. Very well informed and no trouble at all.

Well, before Ms Watson-Holmes had gone into labour. Then all bets were off. The neuro-inhibitors reduced pain but didn’t actually eradicate it, and in some cases substituted pain with other strange sensations. For a very few patients, the effects only lasted around 15 minutes and could not be re-established after the first dose. And they seemed to have some peculiar side effects on the very rare subject. Like the uninhibited swearing. Although Mr  Watson-Holmes seemed to be finding that part sort of funny, in a quiet way, and said she was just channelling her old man.

Ms Watson-Holmes was in fact swearing mightily through her latest set of contractions – _it doesn’t hurt, it just feels weird, oh god buggery bollocks fucksucking arsing hell, now it’s hurting, shitting fuckbuggery balls, I feel like I’ve got fire ants in my tendons; if you give me a second dose of that shit, so help me you pissfucking cockbollocksing cow I will bite you. Oh fuck, sorry, sorry, sorry. Sorry. Honey. Ford. Baby, tell the nurse I’m so…. aaaaaaaaarrrrrrgh. Oh Christ, I want my mums. **I WANT MY MUMS!**!!”_

That nice Mr Watson-Holmes didn’t seem so amused now. He was distressed and useless, as husbands so often were, as he petted his wife’s brow and let her near on break his fingers with the way she clutched them.

Well, thought Nurse Greenward, when fancy modern neuro-inhibitors didn’t work, wailing for your mum always seemed like an obvious second choice. She left the now fretting husband, the wailing mother-to-be and the hard working midwife to the immediate drama and slipped out to the waiting room to find the woman’s mother.

She was somewhat startled to find the waiting room packed to the gills with people. All of them standing at attention, crowded near the door, practically thrumming with tension as they listened to the howls and the gnashing of teeth and the frankly alarming level of foul-mouthing emanating from the sainted figure of burgeoning motherhood within.

“How is she?” breathed the shorter, sandy-haired man, “Neuro-inhibitors not working then?”

“Obviously not, John,” muttered the tall man with the wild hair and overabundance of cheekbones, “Or she wouldn’t be screaming about fire ants.”

“Not helping, Sherlock,” muttered the shorter man.

The one named Sherlock pressed his lips together in recognition of this fact.

“There are too many people here,” asserted Nurse Greenward loudly and firmly, “Only immediate family should be here. The rest of you, out.”

The six people who were all well old enough to know better all drew themselves to haughty heights – even the short ones – and glare at her. But Greenward was an old campaigner and glared right back.

“Only immediate family,” she snapped, “The rest of you, out.”

The glaring continued apace.

“If you don’t…” she began.

“We are all immediate family,” said the eldest, a dapperly dressed man in a bespoke suit, clutching an umbrella as though his life depended on it.

“All of you,” said Nurse Greenward sceptically.

“Yes, all.”

There was more shrieking behind the door, which sounded like _“Mum! My god, mum, you went through this to have me? I’m so fucking sorry for every hard time I ever gave yoooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah._ ” A panting space and then again _“I want my mums, Ford!_ ”

Nurse Greenward eyed the three women in the waiting room. “Which one of you is her mother?” She’s already discounted the black woman, who was clearly Mr Watson-Holmes’s mother.

“We are,” said a short, dark-haired woman and a taller woman of Anglo-Indian descent simultaneously.

Nurse Greenward blinked sternly at them. “This is no time for…”

Six pairs of eyes glared and six mouths flattened into forbidding lines, but the Nurse didn’t budge. “This is a maternity ward, not a circus, and only family is to be here. The rest of you,” she jabbed towards the doorway with an imperious finger, “Out, before I call security.”

Everyone was busy unsheathing furiously sharp glares, and so it was the Anglo-Indian woman who stepped up to the plate.

“Look, I know you think you’re doing the right thing, but really. We are all family here. This,” she said, pointing to the man with the umbrella, “Is Ford’s father, Mycroft. Sally,” she indicated, “Is Ford’s mother. Sherlock is Ford’s biological father and also Violet’s… I suppose you might say communal father, while John is her biological father. Mary is Violet’s biological mother and I am Nirupa, Violet’s other communal mother. We are the collective parents and collective grandparents, and so…”

“So you are nobody’s biological mother?”

Nirupa’s train of thought stumbled and stopped “What?”

“The others are all biologically related to the Watson-Holmeses, but you are…”

Nirupa looked suddenly at a loss. Bereft. Cut adrift from her train of thought.

Luckily, by then, everyone else had rallied around.

“Rupe is as much Vi’s mum as I am!” declared Mary hotly, “We’ve raised her together, along with John and Sherlock…”

“That fine woman,” John was growling, “Is every bit my daughter’s other mother, biology be damned. What the fuckbollocksing…”

He was drowned out by Mycroft and Sally presenting a united front of icy disdain, Sally curling her lip in a snarl while Mycroft, in his terrifyingly urbane way, was saying: “You have an extraordinarily limited interpretation of family for this point in the mid-21st Century, Nurse… Greenward, is it, and I suggest you remedy your attitude before it becomes necessary to seek a different choice of career…”

And over the top of all that, Sherlock’s voice rang out, clear as a bell: “You will notice, you unbearably stupid woman, that Violet is asking for her mothers. Plural. Are you deaf as well as narrow minded?”

Nurse Greenward stepped back, as though pushed backwards by the force of the combined personalities, and took a deep, deep breath. She blinked once in the face of this anthropological definition of parenthood, rethought the last five minutes and held up a hand.

Because Nurse Greenward was an old hand, and a tough egg, but she was not actually an idiot. She wasn’t even a terrible person. She’d just become a little blinkered, perhaps shaken by the use of terms like _fuckbollocksing_ , which she hadn’t actually heard before.

“ _Calm down!”_ she snapped, in her low, carrying voice and it actually worked, claiming a momentary hush in the outraged hostility. “Yes, I understand, it takes a tribe to raise a child, and you are a tribe and if you do not behave, all of you, every single one of you, I will have security throw you all into the street and,” at this point she glared at Mycroft Holmes, “I will happily take my retirement and never deal with any of you ever again.”

Mycroft, unused to his threats being thrown back in his face, scowled. Sally looked thoroughly taken aback, and then as though she was trying not to giggle at her husband’s expression.

“You,” said Nurse Greenward, pointing at Mary, “And you,” at Nirupa, “Go to your daughter and remind her that _childbirth is a beautiful thing_ and that she’s _not going to die_.”

“You,” she pointed ferociously at John, “Have taught your daughter the most astonishing range of swearwords and I hope you’re proud of yourself.”

John took that the wrong way and sort of preened, as though he was.

“And you,” she jabbed a finger at Sherlock, “Are a very rude man, but also correct, your communal daughter spoke in the plural, so well spotted, and I hope I can trust you to keep the rest of this rabble in order rather than treating this ward like a railway waiting room. You will all _sit_ and you will all _wait_ and you will all _be quiet_ until the baby is born. _Am I understood_?!”

Then Nurse Greenward turned her back on them, escorted the two mothers into the birthing room and closed the door firmly on the four remaining grandparents.

“I think we should all sit down and have a cup of tea,” suggested Sherlock primly. He’d taken up the preening where John had left off, thorough chuffed at having been designated both the sensible one and the one in charge.

John threw a magazine at him.

“Manners, John,” Sherlock rebuked him, “Or are you going to teach us some more of your appalling vocabulary.”

“Shut up, you sanctimonious prick.” But it was obvious that John wasn’t really trying. He sagged into a chair. “I forgot how nerve-wracking this is.”

“Worse than enemy fire?” Mycroft asked, reclaiming urbanity as he sat down.

“Much worse,” John agreed, “Worse than a firefight, worse than standing up in front of a festival crowd of 2000, worse than… almost anything. That’s my baby girl in there and there’s nothing I can _do_.”

“It’s a perfectly natural process,” Sherlock tried to reassure him.

“I know that,” snarled John, practically vibrating with tension, “I’m a doctor, I was there was Mary had Violet, I was…” He grit his teeth.

Sherlock just threw his arm across John’s shoulder and leaned down to whisper in his friend’s ear. “John. I didn’t mean… It’s just. She’s my little girl too. And it’s infuriating to listen to that and not be able to help.” Sherlock scowled. “Childbirth is a ridiculous process. Absolutely ridiculous. Illogical. Pointlessly painful. Someone should devise a better system.”

“Someone should,” agreed Sally. Mycroft squeezed her hand. John leaned into Sherlock’s hold and closed his eyes.

And there they all sat, willing a fast and less painful delivery for their collective daughter.

And two painfully tense hours later, Ford emerged from the birthing room, a tiny bundle in his arms and a look on his face that Sherlock recognised. He’d seen it on John’s face many years before, when John had brought Violet out to meet him.

Of course, this time he was already in love with that child, even before meeting that bundle. That child with culminating DNA of his own, which he shared with his brother, and of his best friend, and of the fearsome Sally and the vibrant Mary and even though wise, gentle Nirupa’s blood wasn’t there, her influence would be, through Violet, through the grandparenting in the years to come.

“I would like you all to meet our son,” Ford was saying, tears standing out like diamonds in his eyes, “Hamish Donovan Watson-Holmes. Mary and Rupe are looking after Violet.”

And the grandparents gathered and cooed and touched Hamish’s soft new pale brown cheeks with delicate and loving fingertips, and grinned like idiots, and radiated love. Mycroft couldn’t stop gazing at the boy, and murmuring things, except for small shifts where he would raise his eyes to meet his son’s and it was a near thing that they might both break down in sentimental tears, and Sally wrapped her arms around both of them.

John dragged himself away to see Violet and her mothers in the birthing room, and kiss his daughter’s brow and tell her he was so proud of her, and Sherlock followed to just hold her hand, because he still didn’t know how to say how grateful he was for this life and this family. Violet, pale and tired, but beaming, patted his hand, because she knew anyway.

Nurse Agnes Greenward finished clearing away implements and blankets, and checked her watch for how much longer she would give them before shooing away all grandparents, no matter their status, to let the baby and the parents rest quietly together.

But they were, she had to admit, a formidable and united tribe, and that baby boy, she thought, was never going to lack for love.

 


End file.
